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Graham Smith offers an incisive framework for comparing democratic innovations in terms of their realization of some key democratic values, or "goods." The book gathers together a great deal of timely and important material. It should be read by anyone interested in the forms of democratic consultation and their various merits and drawbacks. The strength of Democratic Innovations is its aspiration to compare different approaches by the same criteria, while at the same time engaging in the debate about what those criteria should be.
Smith focuses on six goods, or elements of value, in democratic institutions: inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment, transparency, efficiency, and transferability. He evaluates various democratic innovations in terms of the degree to which they realize these goods. To keep the discussion manageable, he focuses on four categories of innovation, with one or a few cases in each category: citizen assemblies, mini-publics, direct legislation, and e-democracy.
There are some important questions about the way the goods are defined and the way they are applied to these cases. These questions have no settled answers but do offer a good entry into a large and lively current literature.
Consider "inclusiveness." The closest I can find to a definition is that "inclusiveness turns our attention to the way in which political equality is realized in at least two aspects of participation, presence and voice" (p. 12). While he says "turns our attention," the author does not tell us how political equality needs to be realized in terms of participation, presence, and voice in order to satisfy the criterion of inclusiveness. We are told that the criterion emphasizes "fairness of selection rules and procedures," a principle violated by "differential rates of participation across social groups" (p. 21). So, do we value the extent of participation (e.g., the turnout) or the fairness of selection (the representativeness) within the principle of inclusiveness? How do we value political equality in the expression of views, or "voice"? There seem to be several different criteria here, and the differences turn out to be important in the evaluation of different institutions.
Take his primary case study for the category of citizens' assemblies--the famous "participatory budgeting" (PB) in...